AtmanIsBrahman

This post is an uncomfortable truth bomb. But here goes—- There’s a disturbing truth about spiritual teachings: the teaching always has to attract people to it somehow in order to survive. And this attraction will always be corrupt. Every spiritual teacher has to offer “goodies” to people in order to continue its survival. They have to do this because almost no one cares about truth, so they have to be brought into the spiritual practice by some corrupt motive. The only way they could not have to do this is if people in general cared about truth, but that’s too much of a burden for people to take on (at least at our current level of development as a species). For example, the classic is stopping suffering. This is the juiciest goodie of all that gets the ego salivating. Why does Buddhism sell the ending of suffering? Because it gets followers. You’re not going to get followers speaking pure truth— It will either be demonized or no one will care. Now let’s look at some real-world case studies. Peter Ralston is a great spiritual teacher who actually cares about truth, but notice… what does he sell? Workshops, books, online courses. And what are these about? Absolute truth? No— they’re mostly about improving your life, ending suffering, experiencing authentically, and that kind of stuff. I’m not saying it’s bad, but that’s not pure truth. No one is teaching pure truth. And this is nothing against Peter Ralston (obviously he does care about truth), it’s just how it goes. Thinking about the implications of this… of course it applies to actualized.org. What does actualized.org sell? Yes, there is the metaphysical and spiritual stuff, but a lot of the content is Improving your life (personal development), improving your career, getting girls, etc. Also, notice that Leo’s most viewed content is the low-consciousness stuff related to personal development. It has nothing to do with truth. Creating the foundation of followers from the self-improvement stuff—luring in mouse with the cheese— allowed Leo to create actual truthful content. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be possible because no one would watch it and survival wouldn’t be possible. So, this raises the question: what is the most truthful teaching? It’s when you just say the truth to the best of your ability without any disclaimers, offering of goodies, conceptual complication, or anything like that. Leo’s solipsism video is a great example of such a teaching— but it got taken down. Why? Because it has no conceptual complication, there are no goodies (in fact it’s likely to negatively affect your life). There are disclaimers, but strictly speaking a purely truthful teaching wouldn’t include them. Basically, the teaching is bad PR. The conclusion: a pure teaching is possible but it does nothing for you and is dangerous to society. @Leo Gura@UnbornTao@Davino@Natasha Tori Maru

Sadhguru will teach you that you don't need to slay club hoes The ultimate self-help is realizing you don't need self-help

I've been reading the discussion, and I think one important question is, What is understanding? There has to be some way that awakening, enlightenment, or becoming conscious of truth is happening @UnbornTao Is understanding an experience or not? Maybe what you mean by experience is anything that is not the absolute, but that still leaves some questions open: Are you actually conscious of the absolute? What is the difference between an experience and understanding? Since understanding is always something you experience, how is it not an experience?

All you need for self-help is Sadhguru. Seriously. No need for stage orange grifters.

Can you specify what exactly he said? This is very interesting

It seems like this is just a disagreement about how words are used.

I guess the question is if it’s possible for a being to be extremely conscious but at the same time be “evil” by our human definition. If you act immorally, are you necessarily godless or is the immorality a consequence of the godlessness? It’s also interesting how a lot of the things psychopaths don’t feel like guilt and remorse are also removed by spiritual work, where you realize that those things are egoic impulses.

I want to push back on the last blog post. How are sociopaths godless? If we’re being objective, these personality disorders like sociopathy and psychopathy are just differences in the brain and psyche. To call them godless is a weird moralization that’s uncharacteristic of actualized.org. Couldn’t there be a god-realized sociopath/psychopath?

Self help is about improving your life; spirituality is about finding out what is true. I agree there is some overlap, but they're not the same thing. Most mainstream self-help stuff is anti-spiritual and anti-truth stage orange slop

Bro... contemplate human nature. It's not as pretty as you believe It's like I said, a teaching where the teacher just says the truth as they are directly conscious of without any disclaimers, offering of survival benefits, or stuff like that.

I’m not saying that spiritual teachers are corrupt (though they can be), it’s more that society is corrupt in general. So even the least corrupt spiritual teachers have to accommodate the corruption of the masses

I think it depends on what is meant by “this work.” At the end of the day it has to all be truth-seeking, otherwise it’s corrupt in some way. Interestingly though, I find that the more truthful you are, the more it helps your life improve in general. I’m not sure why it works that way, but it seems to from what I can tell. But if the goal is self-improvement from the start, you don’t get truth and you don’t get real self-improvement.

Hating on AI, and hating on new technologies in general 👀 (Ahem… Leo’s blog…)

The idea of someone’s personal history being resolved isn’t that crazy. Considering your personal history important isn’t necessary; it’s just something that most people do unconsciously. If you are conscious, you don’t really care about it. There is just the now, where you can discover things, and that’s it. There’s no need for a past.

I came up with a few questions about this episode. For @Leo Gura or anyone else who wants to chip in. 1) At the beginning of the episode, you said that developing an epistemic process is key, but you can’t tell us what it is because we would believe it. Why not have more trust in the viewer and share the basics of an epistemic process? It doesn’t have to be belief based. I feel like the episode How to Discover What’s True started to do this but didn’t fully flesh it out. Maybe an update could be helpful? 2) Does truth seeking have to feel like a burden, or is it just ego? Maybe the burden framing is problematic, because it assumes you don’t care about truth in the first place. 3) How important is it to read books or attend retreats? This on the list of things that are epistemically responsible. It feels like a double-edged sword because it’s a somewhat belief-based activity, yet you likely do need to take in some information. Maybe it depends on your level of progress in this work: you start out with lots of reading and learning from different sources, then you rely more as yourself as you get more advanced. The challenge then is accurately pegging how advanced you are. 4) What if you don’t love reality? I genuinely care about truth, but I wouldn’t say I love reality. Definitely not in every moment, only in peak states— to say otherwise would be dishonest. I don’t understand the idea that truth-seeking necessarily comes from a love of reality. 5) The episode frames epistemic responsibility as something that’s important for everyone, but what if that’s not true? Maybe it’s only important if you care. For example, if you have a “normie” mind and you just don’t care about truth maybe there’s nothing wrong with just living normally. The counterargument might be that not caring about truth will lead to suffering, but I’m not sure that’s true since lots of people are happy while being deluded (such as Trump probably). The best move might be to accept the radical relativism that, yes, there is an absolute truth, but if people aren’t interested in it then it’s their dream and their choice. 6) The end of the episode mentioned that even with epistemic responsibility, you won’t avoid self deception. Does this apply just to relative things or even the absolute? Obviously you can be wrong about individual things like politics, but can you be wrong about the absolute/God? In other words, can you have an absolute consciousness of God but at the same time be deceived about it? Hopefully these are interesting for discussion/contemplation.

Even spiritual poetry? Spiritual poetry written in a nonconformist free verse style could be groundbreaking. Of course most poetry is pretentious because it’s conformist and the poets don’t deeply understand reality themselves.

Just finished it, deep episode. It aligns with some things I’ve realized about truth-seeking. It also made me wonder if I’m way more epistemically irresponsible than I thought. Will be contemplating this one.

What philosophers are you thinking of? Most philosophers are shockingly lacking in introspection, personal development, and consciousness work. How many philosophers are doing serious work understanding themselves? Not many. The sad reality is that the current state of academic philosophy is just scientific rationalist thinking, but without the real-world consequences that science has. In that way, people are right to say philosophy is mental masturbation-- because the academic kind is. It's just that they're missing pure philosophy.

Contemplation throughout the day Questioning the ego as in “how is my ego acting out” or “how is my ego preventing me from seeing I’m wrong” Tuning into love Radical honesty Lie down with head propped up and don’t move at all. Remove all thoughts. Literally just be— and if you can truly just be for long enough, eventually you get to a mystical state of consciousness.

The problem is that their critiques aren’t fundamental enough. They aren’t questioning the entire rationalist paradigm. What you find in Leo’s work is a special combination: some knowledge of academic philosophy, lots of knowledge about spirituality, spiritual practices, financial independence that allows for truth-seeking as a life purpose, complete autonomy of mind, and pioneering use of psychedelics. That’s why almost no one understands reality as deeply. And this isn’t just to idolize Leo— it’s something we can do too, if we don’t fall into all the traps along the way.

But hate and love are one. The hatred is the other side of the coin of love

@Leo Gura Can you elaborate on how you actually understand things? There must be more to it than just bumping your head against the wall trying different things. I get the sense that it's a sort of mystical intelligence that doesn't ever have a guarantee of being correct. The awakenings like pure direct knowing, but they're never final, there's always more. I remember in an older episode you said that you still struggle to understand understanding itself. Have you had new realizations on the topic?

The ego loves pedophiles and loves to hate pedophiles

This is Pure Philosophy, for those who haven't seen it. https://www.actualized.org/insights/introducing-pure-philosophy

See, the expectation that I have to make an argument is part of the rationalist paradigm. Making precise statements is fine, but academic philosophy overemphasizes this. There's a tradeoff between technical rigor and actual understanding. If you get too technical to the point of qualifying and defining every statement, you're missing out on actual understanding. And the irony is that you can never get a perfectly defined statement because reality is infinite and undefined-- which means that even attempting to define a part of reality will fail. That's why rationalism is an illusion of rigor. Sure, it can be useful in some ways, but its far off from genuine Pure Philosophy.